Nobody Cares About Your Tech: A Conversation with Tom Hill

Tom Hill spent nearly two decades in retail before becoming a fintech CEO, and the single most useful thing that background gave him is an uncomfortable truth for founders: nobody cares about your tech.

Tom started on the front lines of retail, managing stores and teams across Sainsbury's, KFC, Poundland, and SSP, then led digital and business transformation at one of Europe's largest retailers, going from running 150 stores in London to Director of Digital. Today he's the CEO of Zyntrix, a fintech sitting at the crossroads of loyalty, payments, open banking, and digital identity. He's seen the boardroom and the shop floor, and spent years closing the gap between them.

Nobody cares about your tech

Twenty years on the operational side taught Tom that retailers and brands don't care about your tech, they care about the outcome the tech drives. Plenty of fintechs pitched him "we've got this really cool piece of tech that can do X, Y, and Z," but without operational grounding, without understanding what headache it actually solves, it's redundant and impossible to get engagement. He understands why founders fixate on how their product is perceived, they've poured blood, sweat, and tears into it, but consuming your own tech makes you lose sight of the end result. The most successful fintechs, he says, focus on shaping outcomes for the businesses they partner with.

The resistance lives in the boardroom, not the frontline

Having coached frontline teams and sat in C-suite strategy sessions, Tom's answer to where resistance to change actually lives is counterintuitive. It's generally not the frontline. If frontline teams understand what you're doing and why, and you're clear about how it makes their jobs easier, you're pushing against an open door, and they become your number-one change agents. The real challenge is the boardroom, which is designed to drive tension between competing priorities. You have to work your hardest to convince a director who might carry the early work, in the context of a stack of other strategic initiatives all claiming to be more important, guarding against change inertia and apathy. If you can't get through that first room, you go no further. Once you do, you build unstoppable momentum.

What a loyalty program that actually works looks like

Most loyalty programs, Tom agrees, are discount programs with a fancy name. What separates the ones that work is starting from a clear question: what are you trying to drive? His old boss had an acronym he never forgot, Sweet FA: Spend, Frequency, Acquisition. Intelligent promotional engines can drive spend and frequency with relevant discounts on decent-margin products, provided you've got a customer data platform wired into your IDP and CRM. But the more valuable and intangible benefit is getting into the customer's psyche outside your four walls, creating raving fans who talk about your brand to friends and family, which is more powerful than any marketing campaign.

At Zyntrix he decouples the term. Loyalty is really about incentives and a reason to do something, which is why he's proudest of a strategy they call "payments with purpose": incentivizing pay-by-bank through partnerships with charities, ESG, and B Corp companies. Pay via this channel and Zyntrix makes a donation, or offsets the carbon of your parcel by planting a certified tree. The incentive shifts behavior, which is loyalty in everything but name.

Why open banking is finally ready

Zyntrix brings open banking and pay-by-bank to businesses, transformationally lower merchant fees by bypassing the card intermediaries, immediate cash flow, bank-grade security. It's been around eight years, but adoption lagged expectations, and Tom is candid about why: the customer wins aren't clear-cut. Why change from an ingrained Apple Pay or Google Pay without an incentive? So Zyntrix's whole job is making it simple, easy, and compelling for the customer by linking payments to loyalty or ID.

On the "open banking has been about to take off for years" skepticism (Tom welcomes the crypto comparison), his read is that the early years were an infrastructure problem, and that's now largely solved, pay-by-bank appears on Amazon, eBay, and Just Eat. The next phase is adoption, not rollout, and just plonking a pay-by-bank button on a checkout and hoping isn't enough. That's the gap Zyntrix fills. And the weight behind it is real: the Bank of England and UK Finance are squarely behind driving pay-by-bank, with pay-by-bank one of Andrew Bailey's two strategic goals alongside stablecoins.

Why card fees go unchallenged

If card fees are quietly killing retailer margins, why don't more retailers push back? Boardroom prioritization. Sitting over a P&L, the big cuts go to direct labor, marketing, and CapEx first, because that's where the big quantums are. Merchant fees sit at the bottom, treated as just the cost of doing business, rarely scrutinized while quietly increasing. When a card contract renews, ripping out payment infrastructure ranks low on the IT priority stack for the sake of a few hundred thousand pounds in savings. And awareness is low, many CFOs don't even know what open banking is, so the sale starts with education.

The trend he thinks is overhyped

Asked what's massively overhyped, Tom doesn't hesitate: AI. Not because it isn't transformational when deployed against a real problem, but because too many businesses lead with "look at this amazing AI tech" and then go hunting for a problem it solves, expecting their valuation to soar just for saying the word. That's the wrong way round, and it's the same mistake as leading with tech instead of outcome.

Key takeaways

Nobody cares about your tech. Retailers care about the outcome it drives. Lead with the headache you solve, not the cleverness of the build.

Resistance lives in the boardroom. The frontline becomes your best change agent when they understand the why. The hard room is the one full of competing priorities.

Loyalty is about incentives, not discounts. Start from Spend, Frequency, Acquisition, and aim for raving fans and brand affinity, not just markdowns.

Open banking's problem is now adoption, not infrastructure. The rails exist. The work is giving customers a compelling reason to switch payment behavior.

AI is overhyped when it leads. Solve a real, present problem. Don't reach for the AI badge and then look for the problem.

Frameworks worth stealing

Sweet FA

Before building a loyalty program, decide which of three things you're actually trying to drive: Spend, Frequency, or Acquisition. The tactics differ for each, and a program with no clear objective just burns budget on discounts. Then aim past the transaction for the intangible win, brand affinity and word-of-mouth, which outperforms any campaign.

Lead with outcome, not tech

When pitching or building, anchor on the specific operational headache you remove, not the sophistication of your product. If you can't demonstrate what real problem it solves and how it makes someone's day better, the tech is redundant no matter how clever it is. Operational grounding is credibility.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

Retailers don't care about your tech. They care about the outcome the tech can drive.

The resistance to change generally isn't on the frontline. It's in the boardroom.

Most loyalty programs are discount programs with a fancy name.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. Quick questions, quick answers.

Best advice you've ever received? Get stuck in. Understand your business down to the basic operating procedures, and be a real scholar of it.

Advice you ignored and wish you'd listened to? Don't take things too personally, which is genuinely hard when you care a lot.

What would you tell your younger self? Don't sweat the small stuff. You'll overthink most things and crucify yourself over what, from a helicopter view, isn't that big.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Stepping into the CEO role, his mind is always firing. The challenge is making peace with that and building healthy checks and balances, a run or bike ride mid-morning, some work after the kids are in bed, an integrated rhythm rather than an unsustainable one.

Favorite spot? Lurra, a Basque restaurant in Marylebone, incredible steaks, authentic and unpretentious, where they go after board meetings.

Tool you can't live without? Notion. He uses it for technical delivery programs, meeting notes, ideation, follow-ups, and even built his wife's surprise 40th birthday in it.

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Tom Hill is the CEO of Zyntrix, a fintech uniting loyalty, payments, open banking, and digital identity. He spent nearly two decades in retail and operations, from managing stores to leading digital transformation at one of Europe's largest retailers. Find him on LinkedIn.